Some Exercise Health Benefits Don’t Appear on the Scale

Many of us judge our workouts by what number registers on the scale. But some new studies suggest that even if you’re not losing weight, you’re still improving your overall metabolism.

In fact, you may be training your fat to be more metabolically active.

“Our work provides greater motivation than ever to get out there and exercise,” said researcher Kristin Stanford, a postdoctoral fellow at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

The research, funded by the American Diabetes Association and the National Institutes of Health, looked at both mice and men and how exercise can train fat to behave differently than the fat that develops from spending too much time sitting at the office or relaxing on the sofa.

Researchers found that mice who ran on an exercise wheel for 11 days and men who trained for 12 weeks on an exercise bicycle “underwent a browning of their subcutaneous white adipose tissue that appears to have led to profound changes in the way that fat behaved in the body,” a news release from the ADA states. The browner fat was more metabolically active.

To find out if this could affect how the body uses glucose, researchers then transplanted the browner fat from the trained mice into sedentary mice. Twelve weeks later, the mice had better glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity.

“Our results showed that exercise doesn’t just have beneficial effects on muscle, it also affects fat,” Stanford said. “It’s clear that when fat gets trained, it becomes browner and more metabolically active. We think there are factors being released into the bloodstream from the healthier fat that are working on other tissues.”

Once again, studies show that exercise is good for us – whether we’re losing weight or not.

“What we’re showing here is that fat changes dramatically in response to exercise training and is having good metabolic effects,” said Laurie Goodyear, a senior investigator on the study and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “This is not the fat that’s around your middle, which is bad fat and can lead to diabetes and other insulin resistant conditions. It’s the fat that’s under the skin, the subcutaneous fat that adapts in a way that appears to be having important metabolic effects.”

Source: American Diabetes Association news release, National Institutes of Health

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